What do politicians call it when they force you to buy health insurance (or
anything else) every day, for the rest of your life?

They call it "personal responsibility."

How do they get away with that? Can anyone remember a time when personal
responsibility referred to what we each think that we should do? To what we
individually decide is the right thing to do? When exactly did it come to mean
"obey orders," or "do what you are told or pay a fine--and go to jail if you
don't"?

Politicians try to get away with such an outrage by first corrupting a range
of more fundamental principles. A prime example is the charade of a supposed
"right" to health care. In practice that means everyone should demand that
medical care be provided to them by physicians and hospitals at no cost to
themselves--even if they take no responsibility for protecting their own
health, even if they don't give a damn about their health or the cost of their
own negligence, even if they don't lift a finger to help themselves. After
all, they have a "right" to health care, don't they?

Of course, no one and no government can afford medical care that would meet
these demands. When a system that pretends to do so is enforced, patients will
soon discover that they actually have no access to any medical care at all--
except what the government decides to permit.

Those who resist government force but really do take responsibility for
themselves are condemned as greedy for money by those who are greedy for
power.

When did "what I must demand" replace "what I must earn"?

Why have those who only want to seize and redistribute wealth replaced those
who admire producers of wealth--such as quality medical care providers? In
what kind of world does that exist? Only in a world in which achievement is
condemned as persecution of those who achieve nothing, and wealth is condemned
as theft by those who create nothing.

We cannot assume personal responsibility for our medical care by abdicating
the freedom to make our own decisions about it. We must reject the demands of
those demonstrating in the streets that we surrender our own medical decisions
to them. No one has a right to take away our health care choices any more than
they have a right to make us pay for a home they cannot afford, or pay off the
loans on their Ph.D. in Romantic Poetry, or to be given a government job, or,
as we have heard more recently, to enjoy a "right" to free government diapers.

We can assume responsibility, however, by eliminating the restrictions by
state insurance commissioners on our ability to find affordable insurance. We
can assume responsibility by eliminating the power of the Food and Drug
Administration to withhold life-saving drugs from terminally ill patients
until after they are dead. We can assume responsibility by repealing thousands
of pages of laws and regulations written by those with no competence in
regulating anything, let alone medical care. We can assume responsibility by
recognizing the tremendous value of those physicians and others who create our
medical care- -and by respecting their rights.

To preserve our medical care, as well as all the essential aspects of our
lives, we must utterly reject those who promise to fulfill all of our needs if
only we hand over all of our freedom. There can be no greater personal
responsibility.